Just a bit about my trip to Slovenia

Just a bit about my trip to Slovenia
Originally uploaded by matthew_reames.

When I stopped to think about it, sitting 150 meters underground in an old coal mine, wearing a hard hat and jacket, eating a sandwich, surrounded by twenty Slovenian seventh graders was probably not how many other people were spending their half-term holiday.

I was spending the week at Osnovna Šola Preserje, a primary school in a village not far from Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. My class had participated in a European Union eTwinning project with a class from the school (which began when I met one of their teachers at a conference last October in Portugal).

I spent the first two days of my visit (Tuesday and Wednesday) on excursions to various regions of Slovenia with first the eighth grade and then the seventh grade. On Tuesday, we went to the seaside to visit a port, to Piran, an old city where we visited an aquarium, on to the Secovlje Salina to see how salt has been harvested for more than 700 years) and finally to Postojna Cave to see the wonderful limestone caverns. That was just on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, we headed the opposite direction to the geographic center of Slovenia, on to Valenje to the Mining Museum of Slovenia (and the earlier mentioned subterranean meal), then to Šempeter for a forest tour and the Jama Pekel (a completely different kind of cave).

Thursday, I visited children one of the branch schools. In Slovenia, it is usual for the youngest children to attend school near to where they live for the first years of school. Later, my eTwinning partner teacher and I presented our project to the teachers' conference and I also spoke on different ways to use photography in math.

Friday, I visited the other branch school to see the class that we had partnered with. We did some math (in English and Slovenian), they sang some songs for me, we asked each other some questions and had a snack. Later in the day, I visited two English classes at the main school.

During the week, my hosts also managed visits to the deepest lake in Slovenia, the Slovenian Technical Museum, the town of Vrhnika, and the town of Bled where we visited the castle and rowed to the island.

It was a wonderful week!

More details and photos will follow. (I'm having internet connection issues tonight so I'm posting this from my PDA - I hope it works!)

The picture is a view from the school's library window - Amazing!